The MSI Radeon R9 390X Gaming 8G is an extremely powerful R9 390X custom graphics card. The cooler on this particular card is maybe the most capable model available these days. Apparently, this combination sounds rather compelling, so we're interested to see what it can do in our review.


Presentation

MSI is one of the strongest AMD partners regarding their GPUs. If you've been following all the news in the past you might have noticed, that the 390X is actually a refresh R9 290X with more VRAM. Basically This particular cards features 8 Gigabyte of GDDR5 memory in combination with a 512 Bit memory interface. Already in the past AMD cards were quick at 2160p (UHD / 4K), thanks to the wide memory interface as well as the fact, that there was 4 Gigabyte VRAM with all R9 290 as well as R9 290X cards. It looks like AMD is sticking to that legacy - providing more VRAM than their competitior - and we're certainly curious to find out in what extent this pays off or not.


As you can see from the GPU-Z screenshot below, MSI decided to use quite a tiny factory-overclock on the new Radeon R9 390X Gaming 8G. While the reference Radeon R9 390X runs at 1050 MHz GPU clock MSI bumped the frequency by 10 MHz to 1060MHz. A closer look at the memory reveals the AMD board partner overclocked it by 100 MHz. Checking frequencies with Furmark, meaning that we're applying maximum load on the GPU, we see that the card is not throttling on the GPU as well as the memory. Running 3DMark we don't see throttling at all again. In this case, GPU-Z is telling us that the GPU frequency reamains at 1060 MHz through the entire benchmark. This is also what we've noticed when running games, since there is no throttling whatsoever when running recent titles.

Specifications

	MSI Radeon R9 390X Gaming 8G	AMD Radeon R9 390X 8GB	AMD Radeon R9 290X 4GB
Chip	Hawaii XT	Hawaii XT	Hawaii XT
Process	28 nm	28 nm	28 nm
Transistors	6.20 billion	6.20 billion	6.20 billion
GPU clock	1'100 MHz	up to 1'050 MHz	up to 1'000 MHz
Memory GDDR5	8'192 MB	8'192 MB	4'096 MB
Memory clock	1'525 MHz	1'500 MHz	1'250 MHz
Memory interface	512 Bit	512 Bit	512 Bit
Memory bandwidth	390'400 MB/s	384'000 MB/s	345'000 MB/s
TMUs	176	176	176
Shader Cores	2'816	2'816	2'816
ROPs	64	64	64
TDP	300 Watt	300 Watt	290 Watt
Slots	2.5	2	2
Cooler	TFV	AMD Reference	AMD Reference

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Page 1 - Presentation / Specifications	Page 11 - Thief
Page 2 - The card	Page 12 - Sleeping Dogs
Page 3 - Photo Gallery / Delivery	Page 13 - Metro Last Light
Page 4 - Test Setup	Page 14 - Far Cry 4
Page 5 - 3DMark Fire Strike	Page 15 - GTA V
Page 6 - Unigine Heaven 4.0	Page 16 - GRID Autosport
Page 7 - Battlefield 4	Page 17 - Power Consumption
Page 8 - Watch Dogs	Page 18 - Temperatures / Noise Levels
Page 9 - Tomb Raider	Page 19 - Performance Index & Price
Page 10 - Crysis 3	Page 20 - Conclusion